Navigating Nepantla with Joy: Latina Scholars’ Experiences in Academia

• In Event: Schooling Race

Abstract

This study examines how high-achieving Latina faculty at research-intensive universities construct, experience, and mobilize joy within academic environments shaped by coloniality and neoliberalism. Although extensive scholarship documents the racism, emotional labor, and institutional marginalization experienced by racialized faculty, little research has centered joy as an analytic framework for understanding racialized academic life. Drawing on demographic questionnaires and in‑depth Zoom interviews with Latina tenure‑track faculty, this project conceptualizes joy as a relational, racialized, and decolonial practice that sustains scholarly life, fosters community, and counters institutional fragmentation of the bodymindspirit. Grounded in Chicana feminist epistemology, constructivism, and intersectionality, the analysis foregrounds Nepantla—the liminal, tension‑filled space Latina faculty navigate between institutional demands and their embodied, communal ways of knowing—as a critical site where joy is both cultivated and contested. Participants describe cultivating joy through collective relationships, spiritual and embodied practices, and acts that challenge emotional hierarchies privileging productivity over relational well-being. Preliminary findings reveal that joy fuels creativity, intellectual risk‑taking, and long‑term scholarly vision, offering a powerful framework for agency and transformation in higher education. By centering Latina faculty experiences, this study positions joy as essential to resisting racialized institutional structures and imagining more liberatory academic futures.

Authors

• Maria Isabel Ayala, Michigan State University

• Teresa Rivera, Michigan State University